Anna Squicciarini, assistant professor at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), and Christopher Griffin,research associate at the Applied Research Laboratory, recently received an award in the amount of $150,000 from the U.S. Army Research Office in support of the project, “Game Theoretic Approach to Modeling and Detecting Deviant Users in Online Social Networks."The goal of the three-year project is to develop new ways to detect deviant behavior in social networks with the objective of helping to protect U.S. troops while they are online.

“Troop safety online has become a persistent problem as deployed U.S. forces make use of social networks more frequently to stay in contact with loved ones and relieve some of the stress associated with military service,” Griffin said.

“The novelty in the project,” he added, “comes in the combination of game theory with Bayesian detection techniques. Squicciarini has used Bayesian networks to detect anomalous behavior online in the past. What we're doing now is informing that Bayesian network with predictions from game theoretic models of people's behavior.”